Roller conveyors are widely used in handling sheet stocks in the materials handling industry. Roller conveyors are used for moving sheets from one location to another such that the sheets can be chemically processed, i.e. printing by ink or fixing images by thermal reaction.
In a conventional office environment, roller conveyors are widely used in office machines such as computer printers, fax machines, copy machines, image scanners and various products that combine such uses. For instance, roller conveyors may be included as a part of a series of rollers that are rotatably supported on a rigid frame structure in one of those office machines. Roller conveyors are generally constructed in an elongated cylindrical-shaped body that is rotatably mounted between a pair of frame rails. The cylindrical-shaped roller body may be fixed to a rigid support shaft that extends between the frame rails, and most likely, supported by low-friction bearings mounted in the frame rails. In order to impart the necessary frictional or gripping capability of the roller conveyors, the conveyors are normally provided with a layer of a cover material on the outer surface of the cylindrical-shaped roller body. The layer of the cover material can be provided in rubber, urethane or other flexible and resilient materials in order to avoid damages to the objects being conveyed by the roller conveyor, i.e. such as paper, and moreover, to assist in the frictional movement of the objects by the rollers.
Irrespective of the type of flexible material used in the roller cover, the outermost contact surface of the cover material frequently becomes hardened due to the continuous conveying motion and the continuous contact with the objects conveyed in a hostile environment of high heat and low humidity. As a result, the roller conveyors gradually loose their frictional or gripping capability for transporting objects between the rollers and thus, renders the office machine disabled in performing its function. Instead of replacing the roller conveyors at a high cost, it is desirable to have a method for restoring the cover material on a roller conveyor to its original flexibility and resiliency.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and a method for restoring the flexibility and resiliency of a cover material on a roller conveyor.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a roller conditioning sheet and a method for using the sheet for conditioning an aged cover material on a roller conveyor such that its flexibility and resiliency are restored.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a roller conditioning sheet that conditions and cleans the outermost surface of a cover material on a roller conveyor and a method for conditioning and cleaning a roller.